Back to the Mac: OS X 10.7 Lion Review
by Andrew Cunningham, Kristian Vättö & Anand Lal Shimpi on July 20, 2011 8:30 AM ESTBattery Life
Battery life on the Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro improved in our two lighter workload tests by 5%, however under heavy load there was no change. Given that we only saw improvements in our two workloads with built in idle time I suspect Lion may have tweaked some power management settings vs. Snow Leopard, but nothing more. The improvements here might be limited to newer architectures or systems with Apple SSDs however, because they definitely weren't echoed on our older MacBook Pro:
The early 2008 MacBook Pro showed around a 20% decrease in battery life in our two web browsing battery life tests. Once again we saw no difference in our heavy multitasking test. Once again I'm guessing this change is due to some tinkering with OS X's behavior at idle. Our performance data above doesn't suggest any performance issues causing lower battery life on the old Core 2 Duo based MacBook Pro, so there's got to be something keeping the CPU out of its lower idle states during our tests. I checked Activity Monitor during the benchmarks and didn't see anything obvious, meaning it's likely a lower level OS issue. Our own Brian Klug theorized that the lower battery life could be due to the Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro now loading Lion's 64-bit kernel by default instead of the 32-bit kernel like it did in the Snow Leopard days.
The impact is pretty significant on the older MacBook Pro. Older mobile Mac owners dependent on battery life may want to wait to pull the trigger on Lion until at least the first point update.
I will add that something very strange happened on one of our battery life runs with the 2011 MacBook Pro. During our Flash Web Browsing battery life test we recorded a full battery rundown that took under 3 hours, instead of the ~7 hours you see above. Once again I checked Activity Monitor to ensure nothing funny was going on and didn't find anything odd. Subsequent runs couldn't duplicate the result either. It's pretty unusual for us to see that sort of run-to-run variation in our tests so it's not totally clear what happened there, other than Lion does seem to be doing more in the background which could impact battery life than previous iterations of OS X.
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VMFnet - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
I just installed Lion on a OCZ Vertex2 SSD and it still doesn't support TRIM. I guess support for this feature is limited to stock Apple SSDs only.Sapan - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
Thanks for the reply. It is a shame that there still is no TRIM support.In the mean time I would recommend checking out a 3rd party program called TRIM Enabler:
http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322
Though the program is designed for Snow Leopard it works for Lion, but they are making a new version for Lion.
mdlam - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
I love how these diehard Apple fans are trying to resolve their discomforting feelings of exorbitant expenditure to Apple byA: Unreasonably denigrating other competitive alternatives.
B: Exaggerating the usefulness of certain proprietary tools.
C: Empathizing with the company's goals/missions/values
All to resolve the realization that they are paying more money than what they are getting, which is...
A totally outdated OS made to look streamline
A pretty cool looking computer that uses tunnel fans (which are extremely loud) and likes to overheat.
I used Snow Leopard on my Mac Mini for about 2 months and hated it. I think people force themselves to like OSX just because their laptop looks cool.
Horrible graphics speeds. Their BEST video card that you can fit into a their $4500 Mac Pro, is a ATI 6500 series, which is like a 100 dollar card, and offers pathetic performance for gaming--I had a 6950 2gb and that was barely enough. You can argue that Mac pro's should be used for graphics design and other things and not gaming. If that's the case I don't see why they don't put a FireGL or other designer cards in. In any case, who buys a $4500 computer that comes with a bullcrap video card? Some people are IDIOTS.
mdlam - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
Edit: A $170 dollar video card, 6870 1gb...Which is a complete piece of garbage card that is 30% slower than the 5970 1gb. Guess how much the upgrade is? $200.Post is based off of cognitive dissonance theory
parlour - Monday, July 25, 2011 - link
Macs don’t seem to be the right choice for you. That’s alright. Just don’t claim that everyone else has the same needs as you.sjinsjca - Saturday, July 23, 2011 - link
The test with the SSD is intriguing but there's a possibility that the FileVault performance hit might be less in the case of a conventional hard disk.Reason: hard disks are slower than SSDs, so there would be more idle states in which the OS could be performing encryption/decryption tasks.
Worth a spot-check.
EnerJi - Sunday, July 24, 2011 - link
That's a great point. I'd also love to know if the performance impact decreases with an HDD.johnmacward - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 - link
What annoys me is the fact that the recovery partition doesn't keep a copy of the Lion installer for instant re-installation - and with a bit of Apple magic even a copy that updates as the OS updates.A download each time is a possibly expensive prospect considering we all have data caps of some kind.
It also turns a reinstall into a shockingly long 4 hour job which is a major pain.
luca108 - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 - link
Small detail, but in the review you said you could only launch Launchpad by clicking the dock icon or using spotlight, but you can also set it as a hot corner. This is what I personally do... top left corner set for Launchpad and I can quickly get in and out of it to find my apps and utilities.I'm not suggesting it's quicker than using an apps stack on the dock... actually, its the exact same. But it definitely is faster than clicking the Launchpad dock icon or using spotlight to launch it.
Thrakazog - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 - link
Does anyone know if Lion extended trim support to 3rd party SSD's, instead of only the ones apple provides ?